Shadow of Mordor Dev Was Never Worried by Assassin's Creed Comparisons

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor developer Monolith Productions was never worried by accusations of using Assassin's Creed II assets and code because the team were confident about the project's originality.

For those unaware, following the game's announcement earlier this year, a former Ubisoft developer who worked on the first two Assassin's Creed games claimed the new title uses code and assets from Assassin's Creed II. Now, following the game's successful release, the studio's lead designer Bob Roberts has spoken to IGN about how the debacle made him feel.

"I don’t know if vindicated is the right word, because we always knew what it feels like to play," he said at last week's EGX convention. "Once people get their hands on it, they stop worrying about the comparisons and it totally feels like its own thing. There’s so much new going on there thanks to the Nemesis System and the way we combined all the elements to make the world come to life. So we never really got that criticism once people had a chance to play it. As soon as we started showing it, it became clear we had nothing to worry about."

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I don’t know if vindicated is the right word, because we always knew what it feels like to play. Once people get their hands on it, they stop worrying about the comparisons.

Our review of the game singled out the Nemesis System in particular for praise, as it's a complex technological feat that enables the game to procedurally generate bosses for you to take down. As you can imagine, such a system took an incredibly long time to hone but, surely, this now means if the studio wanted to include it in a future game it shouldn't be anywhere near as difficult now the baseline technology is worked out? Well, apparently not. The real time-sink when it comes to the feature is understandably creating all the different voices, animations and attributes so you never see the same guy twice. Then, once this is done, the polishing begins.

"The Nemesis System is the backbone of our idea and was from the start." Roberts explained. "Obviously though it’s so big and there’s so much content tied into it, that once you’ve done all the animations, voiceovers and tuned the fights and so on it takes a huge amount of time over a number of years. We also needed to really figure out how much variation we needed so you don’t see the same guy twice, so you don’t see the same personalities twice either so you can start building stories.

"We’ve worked on so many ideas and tried so many things that did or didn’t work over the years we’ve been on the project that a lot of the conceptual work is there, but at the end of the day it’s just an incredible amount of content, thought and detail that has to go into it in order to bring the game to life. So whatever game you want to apply the concept to, while it has broad potential, you need to be prepared to spend a lot of your development time on it."

Roberts also explained that the news Kinect was no longer compulsory for the Xbox One meant the extra 10 percent of the CPU enabled the frame rate to be bumped, avoiding what could have been a controversial pitfall for the game. Something Tolkien purists still quibble about though - and something that's been addressed before - is whether or not the game takes too many liberties with the lore. While some think the developer has created a character Tolkien wouldn't have approved of in the form of Talion the Ranger, Roberts is adamant the studio remains true to the author's prescribed themes.

"We did the very best job we could do as die-hard Tolkien fans ourselves and we have a lot of people paying close attention to make sure we’re as authentic as we can be," he promised. "There’s always going to be different interpretations as it’s big, complicated stuff but we’re doing the thing that we think is the most authentic to his work, themes and ideas. He looks at death, deathlessness, the corruption of power and so on. Even if we introduce a new character he never wrote about, for the most part people aren’t as worried about Talion the Ranger never having existed previously. There’s some elements people are more comfortable with and we’ve just tried to make it relevant to everything we’ve seen, including his letters to his publisher."

Of course, the critical success the game is already receiving must already have tongues wagging at Monolith and Warner Bros. alike about whether a second jaunt into Talion's world is on the cards but, if that's the case, Roberts isn't saying. When I asked about a potential sequel all he'd say is the team are open to it if demand is there. For now then, we'll have to make do with the game in front of us... not that anyone's complaining.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter.